Trying to install Mint on a Lenovo laptop with EFI boot was a bit of a challenge. After shrinking the windows partitions of the pre-installed Win7 64 bit I tried to install Mint for the EFI boot. It initially seemed to work, however it became clear that only every 2nd or 3rd boot attempt was successful, otherwise the system would start booting but then hang in the middle of it.
I did try several workarounds, played with grub2 settings etc, but nothing worked. I then decided to try another distro and went back to openSuse 12.2, which was running fine apart from printing. Even though openSuse 12.2 installed from the live cd didn't support EFI boot, it installed and booted fine every time with the UEFI boot option disabled in the EFI setup.
When version 12.3 came out, I tried to install that in EFI mode. However, the installer complained that there was no EFI boot partition formatted in FAT present. Reading up on Ubuntu EFI boot setups, I discovered that linux seems to require that EFI boot partition to be some form of FAT. The Win7 installation however runs of a NTFS EFI boot partition. Since the Win7 installation runs of the Lenovo installation DVDs, there is no option to change it to FAT.
Since openSuse 12.3 is very pretty, but is even worse with regards to printing, I have for now wiped Win7 off the disk and installed Mint 14 again, this time providing it with a FAT32 EFI boot partition. It seems to work a lot better than the previous attempts (and printing work a treat as usual!).
Does anybody know how one can format the EFI boot partition to FAT32 after Win7 has been installed in order to be able to install Mint afterwards? Unfortunately I do need Win7 every now and then since a few programs I need have to run on Windows.
installing Mint 14 on Lenovo Z580 with Win7
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Hugo Notte
installing Mint 14 on Lenovo Z580 with Win7
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
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Hugo Notte
Re: installing Mint 14 on Lenovo Z580 with Win7
It seems like the standard installation on this laptop is not a "real" GPT partition table, but something in between. The Lenovo installation disks made from the recovery partition don't leave any choice, but only this one layout.
I have now wiped Win7 off the hard drive and installed Mint 14.1 (Cinnamon). For that I had the partition table set to GPT. Installation went fine and for about a week the laptop run Mint just fine. One day it simply wouldn't boot, the boot process stopped at loading the broadcom driver it had loaded up to the day before without problem. No matter what I tried, Mint wouldn't boot at all.
Backt to openSUse 12.3 which runs perfectly now, including printing.
I have now wiped Win7 off the hard drive and installed Mint 14.1 (Cinnamon). For that I had the partition table set to GPT. Installation went fine and for about a week the laptop run Mint just fine. One day it simply wouldn't boot, the boot process stopped at loading the broadcom driver it had loaded up to the day before without problem. No matter what I tried, Mint wouldn't boot at all.
Backt to openSUse 12.3 which runs perfectly now, including printing.